White-tailed Moochers

A young deer in early December feeds at cracked corn on the driveway. Photo by Roy Lukes.

Everyone knows how children (and a few adults) relish chocolate and ice cream. Perhaps the two most favorite foods of the White-tailed Deer are sweet corn and apples. Little wonder there were plenty of deer tracks for several fall seasons in our sweet corn patch (before we fenced in our garden) growing right next to an old “sport” of an apple tree loaded with fruit.

Fortunately, the apples are wild and wormy, and we had planted more sweet corn than we could possibly consume ourselves. Ordinarily I don’t become too attached to deer, especially those frequenting the garden, but the six-pointed buck and a doe we often saw were exciting to observe.

Naturally Charlotte and I shudder a little on opening day of deer-hunting season to hear the expected “BLAM BLAM BLAM” of the rifles in the woods to the west of our garden. Surely by now the young buck has most likely been transformed into venison sausage and the lucky hunter is happy with his successful experience.

Let’s face it; deer are a public and a renewable resource. I like to see them alive and try to photograph them. To others, deer hunting provides recreation, a challenge, good fellowship, exercise and a chance to enjoy the outdoors, and hopefully provides the hunter with some wholesome meat, a hide, and a trophy to hang on the wall.

A fairly recent estimate placed the value of each deer harvested in the United States at about $1,250. Included in the figure were license fees, food, lodging, entertainment, hunting clothes and equipment, travel expenses, lost earnings, and butchering costs.

In 1974 about two million White-tailed Deer were shot in the United States by over eight million hunters. This brings the total value of that year’s kill to around $2.5 billion! That’s big business if I ever saw it!

Consider too the negative impact from deer such as crop damage, injury and deformation of trees in plantations, destruction of ornamental shrubs (landscaped), flowers and vegetables, and car-deer collisions amounting to somewhat over $100 million annually in the United States and Canada.

The fact that the deer herd in Wisconsin has fluctuated considerably during the past 135 years indicates that people have great influence on their numbers. We affect in many ways the quality and quantity of food the deer will consume. For example there was a great increase in their numbers following the massive timber harvest in this state during the late 1800s. Excellent “edge” containing choice deer food was created by the logging.

The combination of small woodlots, many with evergreens, and the abundance of food provided by the agriculturists today results in optimum conditions for a high deer population. Little by little the state is getting a better handle on the proper management of the deer and is being looked up to as one of the leaders in this very difficult and challenging profession.

If you think this has been an easy process you have another guess coming! One of the very best books describing this complicated movement is, Thinking Like A Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves and Forests, written by Susan Flader and published in 1974 by the University of Missouri Press. How I would like to see this book become mandatory reading by every deer hunter!

Another book I cherish, a “required reading” text too, is Wallace Byron Grange’s, The Way to Game Abundance. Grange said, “it can be infinitely more interesting, more recreational, if the hunter himself has a hand in the production process.” He implied in this fascinating book that people are suffering a habitat dilemma, that we need to expand upon our existing wilderness fragments.

A small “yarding” group of deer find safety in numbers and better food-finding. Photo by Roy Lukes.

I have enjoyed studying A Century of Wisconsin Deer, written by Otis S. Bersing and published in 1956 (second edition in 1966) by the Wisconsin Conservation Department. Imagine that Outagamie, Brown, Kewaunee, Door, Winnebago and Calumet Counties had no deer seasons from 41 to 54 years during the period from 1901 to 1954.

Then dip back to 1851 to 1858, when any kind of deer could be shot statewide between July 1 and January 31. Deer were reported to be numerous in Door County in 1882. By 1888 a deer scarcity was being reported from the northern counties. They were uncommon in Waupaca County in 1897 and by 1912 there were no deer to be found in Door, Kewaunee, Brown, Outagamie, Winnebago, Calumet, Manitowoc and other counties to the south.

In 1914 there was quite a “war” in the woods to the north during the deer hunt with 24 hunters being killed and 26 injured. It sounds more like a “people” season, or do you suppose that by then the deer were shooting back? By 1921 the deer were practically wiped out of Wisconsin and in 1924 the estimated gun-killed deer was down to about 7,000 statewide. There was no open season statewide in 1929 and 20 counties still reported having no deer.

Sixty counties were reporting deer by 1938 when around 33,000 were shot. Gradually their numbers began to climb and by 1942 the deer herd probably reached its peak. The first doe and fawn season brought the total kill in 1943 to 128,300, and up to 168,000 in 1950 when for the first time since 1913 it was legal to shoot deer on Chambers Island in Door County.

The ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s were “stormy” years in northern Wisconsin in terms of the regulating of the hunting season and determining the proper deer harvest. By 1961 the variable quota system had been established and the total picture was beginning to improve. A turning point came especially with the advent of the successful and productive deer-management units, about 100 of them, varying in size from small areas to large tracts including several counties.

To give you an idea of how the number of deer within one county can change, there were no deer in Buffalo County (along the Mississippi River on a line due west of Brown County) in 1929. By 1962 the largest deer kill of 2,465 in the entire state occurred in Buffalo County.

Sit back and relax. Enjoy the deer in whatever way meets your fancy. I will continue to prefer the lithe beauty and grace of live deer and the great challenge of capturing their elegance on film. Hunters will help to maintain at least some semblance of a healthy balance between the deer and the land and its plants. I sympathize with those of you who live in areas that are permanently closed to deer hunting, where these large mammals are literally eating you out of “house and home” as well as being terribly destructive to most native vegetation.

As for us, we have fenced in our garden to protect the vegetables, and eagerly wait for the deer hunt with rifles to end so that we can safely venture back into our own woods.